Chapter 18 The Lady in the Bathtub from The Shining
EIGHTEEN
THE LADY IN THE BATHTUB FROM THE SHINING
“WHAT’S MY HAWAIIAN NAME?” I was in Hawaii with my friend Shaney Boy.
“Kilikina,” he said, Kiki for short. To this day, no one on Hawaii calls me Christina.
I’m Kiki.
Kiki is my real name. Kiki is who I really am. She’s fierce, and free, and she doesn’t have MS or trauma or low self-esteem or a history of bad decisions.
She’s a simple, sweet, sharp, smart-mouthed dancer. Kiki is both who I could have been, and who I really am.
When I first visited, I met a woman who had just had her first child, Pua. Back then, I felt a kinship with Pua, and as I watched her grow, I was so happy that she had no inkling that I was a TV star back in the States.
August 6, 1996, Maui
Pua is the closest thing to perfection that there is. She is the most extraordinary child. I am lifted when I am with her. I am blown away by her magnetism and wisdom. She is a beacon of exuberant light and love. I am so grateful.
When Pua was about three years old, I arrived on the island and rushed to see her—I was so excited, as ever—but as soon as Pua laid eyes on me she glared at me with such disappointment and anger, all haughty and pouty face.
“Hi, Christina Applegate,” she said. Auntie Kiki had been lying to her all this time.
Pua is in her thirties now, with two kids and a husband. But she still calls me Auntie Kiki.
So no, my name is not Christina Applegate: it’s Kiki.
I am a troubled and broken and beautiful and smart and interesting and funny person—I am all the things—but I’m not Christina Applegate. The world puts those two names together and I get the heebie-jeebies.
I’m sorry to my mom and my father, but I reject it.
I hate having to tell people that that’s who I am, but when you call me Christina Applegate, you don’t fully understand the kind of onus that puts on me.
Christina Applegate is a character, a person who was beholden to people and production companies and everything and everyone else in this town.
And she was someone I never was. When I hear that name, I catch my breath, and yet I also don’t want the world to fully know who I am either.
I suppose this book is a small step to showing you all who I really am.
Actually, a big step.
When I see “Christina Applegate” out in the world—except my star down the hill, goddamn it; I earned that—I always think, That’s a weird name. Because for my entire life, no one who loves me has called me that. Almost no one—almost no close friends, almost no family—calls me Christina.
When I was growing up, my mom called me Teenybopper.
To his dying day, my father called me Christina.
Being “Christina Applegate” has affected everything.
For a long time, I felt—well, I guess I hoped—that I lived in a magical world where people really loved me for who I was as a person.
But stuck here on this MS bed, I’ve recently been coming to the painful realization that especially when it came to the men in my life, when I met them, they already knew who I was, even if I didn’t know who they were.
This was especially true during that formative decade I worked on Married…
with Children. Were men into Kelly Bundy or me?
Recently, this creeping realization has been coming over me: they all knew me.
Maybe that’s presumptuous to say, but I wonder if I was just a check mark or a fantasy.
They could have “Christina Applegate,” but they could never have Kiki.
I kept her buried deep within. Married… with Children was on in ninety or a hundred countries.
Later, Anchorman was everywhere. The Sweetest Thing may have been hated by critics, but it was popular.
So much stuff I did meant that I was constantly in the public eye.
Everyone “knew” me before I knew them. What were they thinking?
I always wanted to ask, “What were you thinking when you met me? Did you have a preconceived notion of me, and did I disappoint you?” I am not that person that I played, that Christina Applegate from the TV or the movies.
I was scrappier, more profane, more romantic, a woman who wrote poetry and desperately wanted to be loved for who she was.
I remember being on a date with someone when I was in my thirties, and I was so excited. We went to the Hotel Bel-Air, to have dinner and drinks. I sat there talking to this guy, being my usual self. We were friends already, but this was the first time we were trying the romantic thing.
But I could see his eyes glassing over, and he was clearly not interested in anything I had to say. I thought I was being cute and funny and flirty.
“Am I bothering you?” I asked. “Do you not want to talk to me?”
“No, no, no. Totally,” he said vacantly.
It was evident that I wasn’t his cup of tea, and it kind of broke me. Because that happened so many times: people had a preconception of who “Christina Applegate” was—even friends I’d known for a while—and when they met Kiki, they didn’t recognize her.
Even thinking about it to this day, it makes me sad. Am I not who people want me to be?
I think I disappointed people, and worse, I don’t think they actually wanted to get to know who I really was.
But then you can never live up to something that doesn’t exist.
I’ve always felt like the plus-one in life—not the one invited, but the one who is brought along to make up the numbers. I’ve never really felt I belong anywhere.
These are the things I think about, lying here on this bed.
That feelings spigot—which had been turned off for my entire life because I had to go out and work—is fully open.
I’m fifty-three as of this writing and feeling everything, for the first time.
I pushed all my feelings down into a Little Ball of Trauma? in my stomach, but that ball is being pulled apart these days.
And the tears feel different, profound, guttural.
They’re coming from a place that I don’t even fully understand.
For so much of my life, I’ve felt like the good underlies the bad, but something strange has happened, something I’m not used to.
I won’t lie anymore, be the good girl, and say that any of this is a blessing, but there’s some shred of self-understanding that continues to slowly emerge as I tell the story of these past fifty or so years.
I want to talk to that little girl who always thought she had to be perfect. Maybe that’s what this book is.
All this has left me unable to be polite anymore—it’s boring and it takes too much energy.
Being kind and loving and nurturing is beautiful, but to be polite is almost to lie.
To be respectful is important, but there’s something about that sweet politeness demanded of women that stinks of faking our true feelings.
I have done the Superwoman thing once before, after my double mastectomy.
I thought I should tell everyone that it was a blessing, when in reality, my body looked like Lorraine Massey, the once beautiful, then grotesque ghost in room 237 at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
I was determined to never do that again.
I was going to be honest this time. I hoped I’d never have to face the choice, but here we are.
(Actually, I’m sadder about the mastectomies now when I look down at my body than I was immediately afterward.) With my broken metatarsal, well, a broken bone heals.
With the cancer, it was taken out of my body, and I was able to move on.
But MS is my constant companion. In fact, I will probably go away because of it. It scares me to death. I don’t want to dance with this pain anymore, and I don’t want to be in the predicament I’m in. Everything about it sucks.
My knees feel like I have bricks attached to them, heavy and painful.
My skin feels like it’s got third-degree, fourth-degree, fifth-degree burns.
Something is constantly stabbing at my ankles.
When I put my feet down on the ground when I wake up, it feels as if the floor is made of needles, yet I can’t feel them because my feet are completely numb.
Somehow it manages to be both things at once.
All my nerve endings are on fire, sending the wrong signals back to my thirty-lesioned brain.
This accounts for the pain I feel twenty-four hours a day.
Some days I can get through it, but I’m usually at an eight on the pain scale even if I appear fine.
When I walk from my room to Sadie’s room, one of my favorite things to do, the pain is almost unbearable—and her room is just down the hallway from mine.
And then if (when!) her room isn’t picked up, I don’t have the balance to get around the things on the floor.
I wish I could say that I am a miracle. Thirty lesions and still kicking.
Though most days it’s very hard to believe, and in any case, I don’t want to minimize what this disease does to a human body and soul.
MS is a disease of progression, but it’s also a disease of roller coasters.
Some days I can bear to dance, others I fear the wheelchair.
That’s why MeSsy, the podcast I host with my dear friend Jamie-Lynn Sigler, avoids any kind of sugarcoating when it comes to the terrible disease we share.
To me, this is part of showing my real self to the world.
We’ve created a sort of MS family through this radical honesty that has led to genuine bright spots, not thoughts and prayers and platitudes.
I even met Doug the Pug through the larger MS circle.
MS sucks, but the MS community rocks. It took me a long time to lean into that though.
While we were making season 3 of Dead to Me, some putrid paparazzo snapped a picture of me in a wheelchair.
From there, it was assumed that my character had gotten in an accident, so I had no choice but to announce on social media that I had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I was heartbroken.